


Heart skipped a beat (The 'sometimes I still need you' remix)

by maharetr



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Past Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers, Past Relationship(s), identity crisis, movie-consistent non-happy ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-30
Updated: 2016-07-30
Packaged: 2018-07-22 23:18:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7457584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maharetr/pseuds/maharetr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He blinks awake, and he’s staring up at a ceiling. He looks around, and he’s in a motel room. No — that’s his jacket and cap that he’s draped over the end of the bed at some point, and it’s his notebook and knife under the pillow. His motel room.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heart skipped a beat (The 'sometimes I still need you' remix)

He blinks awake, and he’s staring up at a ceiling. He looks around, and he’s in a motel room. No — that’s his jacket and cap that he’s draped over the end of the bed at some point, and it’s his notebook and knife under the pillow. His motel room.

He’s been having ... lapses, again. His body and mind shutting down until he returns hours later, not having moved from the bed, but drenched in sweat and shaking. He had forgotten shivering in a hot, hastily constructed shelter somewhere until he was doing it in the motel room. Natasha was alternately singing and swearing at him, bathing him down with precious, scarce water, covering his eyes to keep out the glare. Something had gone wrong with their extraction; he tries to pull the memories into something cohesive, but they slip away as hazy as a dream.

Maybe she’d been here in the motel room, too, humming and holding his hand. But he’s pretty sure he couldn’t have told the difference between the air conditioner’s hiss and the sussation of wind over desert sand. He’s not exactly reliable right now.

He pulls himself upright. There are binoculars on the nightstand, and that’s a much more recent memory, something solid to hold onto in his mind — the cemetery, and that goddamn file, and Steve, and Steve’s goddamn sad smile. He’s not even sure how long it’s been since then, but no one’s come to demand payment for the room; maybe he’s only lost a few days, if he’s lucky. The lapses are getting shorter, then.

He hates having to maintain this body. But he hates the feeling of grime and grease more, so he forces himself out of his clothes and into the shower. He leans against the tiles, letting the wall hold him up and the hot spray wash over him, and forces himself to take one breath after another, trying to pull together a semblance of functionality. America. Washington D.C., and Hydra’s in pieces. The grounding helps, but the hot water swells another memory echo — hot water from a canteen, and Natasha’s voice: _This will pass_...

The only thing that had made it truly pass had been extraction and a return to Hydra; the chair, and the drugs...

He remembers, viscerally, the calm blankness that descended after the sessions with the chair. He remembers the technicians tending to his body, ignoring _him_ and he...he would admit this to no one, but some days — like today, when he barely has the energy to wash himself — he misses that.

There are going to be no more extractions, and he’s going to have to get himself through this on his own. Or maybe not entirely on his own — when he’s nearly presentable, he drags himself out to pay for another week, only to find the receptionist waving him away. “Paid til the end of the month, courtesy of the pretty redhead. You’ve got an admirer?”

That is a complicated thing to answer. Their debts had been complicated even before he had been made to forget them. He makes himself smile. “Sort of. Thank you.”

It’s a message - she knows where he is, but she’s willing to keep her distance.

He goes back to his room and crawls back into bed. Sleep, when it comes, is a blessed, blank oblivion.

~*~

He wakes again. He recognizes the ceiling; has grabbed the knife and is on his feet before the second knock comes.

“It’s me,” she calls through the door. Natasha. He doesn’t relax, exactly, but he does slip the blade back under the pillow. “Can I come in?” She’s brought Chinese, and he hadn’t realized how ravenous he was until he unlatches the door and lets her in.

She’s been here before — she doesn’t look around for chairs or a table. She just drops her shoulderbag beside the door and heads straight for the bed, pushing aside the covers with casual, intimate ease to sit down. But she’s alert, too — casually tracking how he moves in her peripheral vision as she unpacks containers and drinks. He tries to remember the last time she was here, buying himself time with mouthfuls of General Tso’s chicken.

“What’d you give Steve?” He waves at the binoculars with his chopsticks as if that’s enough context.

She blinks at him. Has he asked that before? Certainly, he should probably know the answer.

“In the file?” she asks. “Past things.”

“Things about the Soldier, or things about James Barnes?”

“Both,” she says. “Do you want to see?” It’s absurd, how casually she mentions it; this wanting to read about past lives when he still inhabited the same body. He shakes his head. 

“I remember,” he says. He gulps cold water gratefully. His throat hurts; everything hurts. “I remember Bucky,” he adds, softly. “I remember who he was to Steve. I’m...I’m not that person anymore.”

“He wants who you are now,” she says, just as quiet.

The laughter rises up like bile. “Does he really? He thinks he does — he thinks with a hug and some talking about our feelings, we can both go back and live in Brooklyn and be all cosy and time displaced together.”

She opens her mouth, inhaling to rebuke him, and then she sighs and winces.

“Yeah, that’s exactly what he thinks,” he says, bitterly. “He’s still chasing after a damn ghost story.”

“So go tell him that,” she says evenly. “Let him know you’re okay.”

He snorts. “Yeah, so I rock up and tell Rogers his long-lost lover is in fact long gone —” Her startle is minute, redirected into reaching for her own water bottle, but it catches his breath in a split-second barrage of emotions. He doesn’t _care_ that Rogers hadn’t told her, but his stomach still twists. This feeling that he’s betrayed a confidence somehow — a reflex of this body, it has to be. He exhales and barrels on: “Rogers can’t lie to save his life, you know that. Everyone from Joe Public up to the head of the CIA is going to know I’m still alive.” 

“That doesn’t have to be the end of the world,” she says.

“No? What did you want, after Barton brought you in?”

She winces, and stirs her rice with her chopsticks. “I wanted to be left alone.”

“And didja get it?” His tone is scathing, but she doesn’t flinch.

“No.”

“There you go.”

She doesn’t ask what he wants to do instead. They both know about that yawning, terrifying gulf of the unknown. He stumbles towards it anyway.

“I want … I want to be left alone, too, okay? I want _peace_.” The truth is raw in his throat.

“I know,” she says, softly. She doesn’t try and tell him how unlikely that is, for him or for her. Or for Steve, and he won’t feel guilty about that. He fucking won’t.

“I want,” he says, deliberately, tasting the shape of the words in his mouth. He _wants_ Steve to smile at him. He _wants_ the intimacy he remembers from Barnes. But… “I want a shitload of things I cannot have, not ever, but I can start by hunting down every last Hydra operative. That’s a sort of peace.” He’s glaring at her, daring her to challenge that.

“Maybe,” she allows. “But Steve’s going to chase after you — and that’s not going to be peaceful for either of you.”

“So tell him I’m dead. Let him move on.”

“That would _kill_ him.” Natasha leans forward, glaring at him. “He’s seventy years out of sync, and Peggy Carter only remembers him on alternate Tuesdays. You’re _it_.”

He pauses, and, rather than examine that too closely, he looks at her, really looks at her, instead. She’s angry, yes, but under that… He tilts his head.

“You _care_ ,” he says, marvelling. “What debts do you owe Captain America?”

It’s half jibe, half intel dig. He’s not expecting her face to slip from anger into…into…

“I don’t -. Not like you think,” she says. “He’s my friend.”

“Friend!” He half-shouts it, a disbelieving laugh. “When did you learn to get so attached?”

“From _you_ ,” she snaps. “You said over and over not to get attached, just like the handlers told us. And then you spent five days carrying me out of Yemen, and made me drink your water ration.”

He doesn’t remember, and then he does — the weight of her on his back, her labored, reassuring breathing against the side of his neck. He goes still.

“The longer between wipes, the more you cared, too,” she says, softly.

And he can’t remember, but he remembers staring at James and Steve in the video at the Smithsonian, remembers staring through the binoculars, and the painful twist in his chest at Steve’s sad, wry smile.

“I can’t…” He scrubs his hands through his hair and grimaces. “I’m not James Buchanan Barnes anymore, okay? I don’t know who I am.”

“He’s not the weedy kid from Brooklyn anymore, either,” she says. “He’s not a commanding officer in a just war, either. Right now, he’s just figuring out how to be Steve.”

“He’s got you and Wilson to help him figure that out. To be his _friends_.”

She looks at him, and she _looks_ at him. “He wants you,” she says again. 

It’s on the tip of his tongue —what if Steve didn’t

“I want,” he says deliberately, “to be left alone. Give me a chance at that, okay?”

She closes her eyes, and he tries not to hold his breath.

“I’ll give you a head start,” she says, reluctantly. “Two months. If you can’t hide yourself by then, you deserve to have Steve come crashing after you.” She’s going for her shoulderbag. “But you check in with me. You don’t check in with me, I’ll come find you.”

“I trained you,” he scoffs.

“I _remember_ everything you trained me in,” she counters. It’s a low blow, but that doesn’t make it any less true. 

She offers him a manila envelope. Passport, birth certificate, credit cards — it’s better than he could have hoped. He squeezes his eyes closed tight, tries to make it a long blink.

“Fury knows about these,” he says, looking up at her, looking for the catch. She smiles at him, an expression approaching actual, wry pleasure.

“Former Director Fury has a lot on his plate,” she says. “He’s delegated a bunch of things to me.”

“But you’d tell him, if he asked.”

She grimaces. “Don’t give him a reason to ask, then.”

He mock salutes her.

“And don’t...don’t get yourself killed out there.” He knows in the beat of silence after that she’s asking him not to die, too. That’s a harder thing to assent to, but he nods, slowly, and it’s a thank you and a promise in one.

They’ve never been good at goodbyes. She stands and starts wiping down the few surfaces she touched while he starts gathering up the takeout containers for proper disposal. It’s nice, this ease. But it’s dangerous, too. Comfort is a danger. They nod to each other, tightly, and then she turns and leaves without looking back.

He rifles through his backpack - weapons, change of clothes, energy bars, phone charger, wallet. He switches out the cards, snaps the old fakes into multiple pieces between his metal fingers, then pockets them to distribute throughout the city’s trash cans along with the wiped-down takeout containers. He tucks Natasha’s papers safely at the bottom of his pack, and takes his notebook and knife from under the pillow. The pages are nearly full of everything he can remember, sketches and photographs and twice-encoded intel. Things he knows he’s underlined; question marks are dotted around the things he’s guessing. He takes out a pen, scratches out the question marks around _Natasha — ally_ , underlines it twice. Then he adds an arrow from it, and writes and underlines _friend of Steve. Will help Steve._.

He’s leaving Steve in good hands; he doesn’t need to keep intel on the guy anymore. But when Steve’s photo slips free he stares at it on the bedspread for a long time. Attachments are weaknesses, but he tucks it back between the pages and slams the notebook shut anyway. They’re all safer without him. Steve is safer without him. He does one last security sweep, shrugs the backpack on, and leaves the motel room — and America — behind.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from 'Heart skipped a beat' by The XX


End file.
